NAME

VERSION

SPECIFICATION VERSION

ABSTRACT

This document specifies Unixish, Perl framework for data processing (transformation, conversion, whatever) using the tried-and-true Unix toolbox philosophy. For the implementation, see Data::Unixish.

STATUS

Early draft. The 1.0 series does not guarantee full backward compatibility between revisions, so caveat implementor. However, major incompatibility will bump the version to 1.1.

PHILOSOPHY

The Unix philosophy says a program should do only one thing and do it well. Problem is solved by sewing or chaining together a sequence of small, specialized programs. From Douglas McIlroy, the original developer of Unix pipelines:

This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because
that is a universal interface.

In Unixish, programs translate to functions. Unixish is essentially a set of guidelines and tools on how to write such functions.

The goal of the framework is to let users easily create functions that can be used as normal Perl functions operating on arrays and streams (filehandles), as well as functions that can become Unix command-line utilities.

When processing, undef/invalid/non-applicable value should generally be skipped (passed unchanged)

For example, the date dux function accepts either an integer (assumed as Unix timestamp) or a DateTime object. Other values like undef, an empty string, or other kinds of unsupported objects should not be processed and just passed to the output stream unprocessed. A warning can be logged if needed.

A well-written dux function can be readily transformed into a usual Unix command-line utility.

NAMESPACE ORGANIZATION

Unixish is the specification.

Data::Unixish is the implementation.

Each dux function should be written in all-lowercase name, put under Data::Unixish::FUNCTION_NAME package. The function itself is put in that package with the same name. For example the Data::Unixish::date package contains the Data::Unixish::date::date function.

A further subpackaging is allowed, for example: Data::Unixish::English::count_syllables.

SEE ALSO

Similar projects on CPAN

Similarly inspired by Unix pipes, OO. I didn't find this project before I started Unixish.

Some of the differences: Text::Pipe is, as the name suggests, more text-oriented. It was created to unify text/template processing. Unixish on the other hand focuses on functions that can accept streams/arrays.

Perl Power Tools (1999-now)

(Search for ppt in CPAN).

Actually not quite the same thing, but the end result is roughly the same for many text-oriented Unix utilities (like wc, sum, head, tail, etc).

AUTHOR

Steven Haryanto <stevenharyanto@gmail.com>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2013 by Steven Haryanto.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

Module Install Instructions

To install Unixish, simply copy and paste either of the commands in to your terminal